The Secret Cut-Up

Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, William Burroughs and Moroccan Healing

by David Holzer

Lou Reed once said that William S. Burroughs “changed my vision of what you could write about, how you could write.” Scholars have explored how Burroughs’ example shaped Reed’s conceptual thinking, subject matter and writing style but not how it might have influenced his music. This article considers Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music in relation to WSB’s worldview, his cut-up and fold-in practices and Moroccan healing music.

The Thing Itself

In its original form, Metal Machine Music (MMM) was a double album that claimed to be four 16:01 minute sides of guitars tuned to one note feeding back with each other and extra guitar occasionally overlaid by Reed as he edited on two tape machines. According to Bob Ludwig who mastered the album, the timing is “not quite honest, Lou wanted to have it seem there were four equal sides.”^* There are no songs, vocals or other instruments. The fourth side ends in a locked, raised groove. Unless the tonearm is lifted, it will play for infinity.

MMM was released in summer 1975. It has been claimed that 100,000 copies were sold but most of these were returned to Reed’s label RCA by record stores within the first three weeks.

The album was pretty much universally reviled on its release in summer 1975. Among the barrage of hostile reviews was one in smart-ass music magazine Creem by “CyborgQX38” that consisted solely of the word ‘NO’ repeated roughly 1000 times. Even Reed scorned the album, saying “anyone who gets to side four is dumber than me” although he swiftly began insisting the album wasn’t a joke.

Perception of MMM has changed over the years. At first, it was dismissed as a punky fuck off to Reed’s record company RCA who had been hassling him to deliver a new album. To his management who he claimed had whored his talent and ripped him off. To the fans he’d gained post the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal live album and studio album Sally Can’t Dance which made the upper reaches of the US album charts in 1974 and who he regarded as idiots.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s MMM had its devotees, influencing bands that include Sonic Youth, Throbbing Gristle, and Japanoise artist Merzbow.

After saxophonist and composer Ulrich Kreiger heroically scored MMM for acoustic instruments in 2002 so it could be played by avant-garde German ensemble Zeitkratzer on acoustic instruments, attitudes changed. Reed was delighted and vindicated.

In 2017, Pitchfork writer Mark Richardson described MMM as “the product of genuine love and passion, still exhilarating and bursting with possibility four decades on.”

Today, it’s rare to find a music writer who dismisses the album as a prank. But they content themselves with MMM‘s creation story, the process of making the original album and its effects on the listener. They shy away from tackling how and why it might have been constructed the way it was, what it might mean.

Reed Reading Burroughs

Growing up in affluent white bread Freeport, Long Island in the 1950s as a highly intelligent, sexually fluid teenager prone to depression, Lou Reed was searching for something to rebel against.

The rock and roll, R&B and doo-wop beamed to his bedroom by New York rock and roll stations became his religion. He worshipped the Beat writers who challenged the conformity of the era, most significantly William S. Burroughs.

Reed and Burroughs didn’t physically meet until 1979 when, at the invitation of mutual friend Victor Bockris, Reed called into WSB’s Bunker on the Bowery. But Casey Rae observes that “Burroughs was an essential part of Lou Reed’s creative makeup” from early on.

It’s not known when Reed first read Burroughs. Junky, WSB’s account of his descent into morphine and heroin addiction in New York’s lowlife, boho-criminal underworld was first published in 1953 when Reed was 11. Burroughs influenced Reed’s terse, journalistic style in songs such as the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For The Man” on their 1967 “banana” album.

Naked Lunch was first published in the US in 1962 but the Beat-hungry Reed might have got his hands on a copy of the 1959 French Olympia Press edition. It’s not difficult to imagine why Burroughs’ antinovel with its fractured though not cut-up structure and often explicitly homosexual “routines” through which he attempted to shit out his wealthy “educated Midwest background” would appeal to an alienated Reed searching for his own identity.

The monstrous Dr Benway could have reminded Reed of the doctors who administered the course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) he endured aged 17. Benway’s comment, “A heart-warming sight…those junkies standing around waiting for the man” might have fed into Reed’s song. Then again, waiting for the man is all part of the ritual of scoring.

As a young man living with the short-term memory loss that invariably follows ECT, it might have been a comfort to read a book where it didn’t much matter if you couldn’t get past page 17.
Quoted on the cover of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (2010), Reed said he admired Burroughs as “the person who broke the door down…he alone had the energy to explore the interior psyche without a flinch.”

It’s hard to prove a direct Burroughs influence on Reed’s writing practice. “The Murder Mystery” on the Velvets’ third album is unusual in his canon in that the lyrics are impenetrable. He didn’t usually experiment, preferring to tell stories, be understood.

“The Murder Mystery” could be linked to WSB’s fold-in strategy of placing two or three columns of text side by side — for instance, in parts of mid-60s The Third Mind collaboration with writer and artist Brion Gysin — and then reading across the columns from left to right. It features spoken word passages recited simultaneously, separated to come from left and right speakers:

Objections suffice
Apelike and tactile bassoon
Oboeing me
Cordon the virus’ section
Off to the left
Is what is not right

or

English arcane
Tantamount here to frenzy
Passing for me
Lascivious elder passion
Corpulent filth
Disguised as silk

Reed’s use of “virus” is probably coincidental but it recalls Burroughs’s belief that “language is literally a virus…that is to say, the Word Virus…an organism with no internal function than to replicate itself.”

Sonic Strategies

It’s impossible to prove whether Reed knowingly applied WSB’s cut-up and fold-in practices to the tapes of guitars feeding back that are the raw material of MMM. If he didn’t, the working method he arrived at by himself is remarkably similar.

Reed might have heard bootlegs of Burroughs’ cut-up tape experiments, perhaps recorded at Paul McCartney’s studio in 1965 where WSB’s friend Ian Somerville was a tape operator, not officially available until 1981’s Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. He’s highly likely to have heard Call Me Burroughs (1965), WSB reading selections from his writing.

He may have read Burroughs’ account of his sonic attack on London’s Moka Bar described in his essay “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden” first published in The Electronic Revolution (1970) and included in The Job: Interviews with William Burroughs (1974).

Burroughs used tape cut-ups and photographs to, he believed, shut down the Moka coffee bar in London’s Soho. This was revenge for, as WSB’s biographer Ted Morgan wrote in Literary Outlaw (1988), the fact that “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.”

WSB described the process he used to take his revenge thus:

Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is playback.

Burroughs’ intention was magical, to cause change to occur in conformity with his will. He believed he’d sent a ripple through reality to, as Morgan put it, “place the Moka Bar out of time.”

When the Moka closed on October 30th, 1972, after a series of accidents and fights on the premises, Burroughs was sure his sonic, psychic attack had worked.

Incidentally, Reed too was no stranger to magical thinking. After Angus MacLise, avant-garde composer, musician, poet and the Velvet Underground’s first drummer gave him The Morning of the Magicians in the early 1960s he dived headlong into what he described as “astrology, the occult, mysticism, Transcendentalism, the third eye, the whole bit.” Reed followed Theosophical teacher and writer Alice Bailey who taught him how to call down the white light. He was a member of the Church of Light in New York. In an interview with British journalist John Tobler, he spoke of “going to a woman in California who removed demons from my head.”

All too often, it’s suggested that Burroughs’ use of ritual magic involving words, images and sound somehow aligns him with woolly-headed magical thinking. But it’s important to remember that, as Oliver Harris says, his actions are “a mirroring response to the black magic WSB identified in the media.”

Burroughs scholar and author of William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll (2020), Casey Rae adds: “Looking back, Burroughs was prescient. We’ve seen the institutions of Western civil society, the citadels of enlightenment, undermined by small units of text, image and sound. Burroughs, who believed himself to be in a hostile war realm at all times, was interested in the weaponization of those units.”

The attack on the Moka Bar conformed to Burrough’s mission to, as he told an interviewer in 1965, “create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness.” With MMM, Reed wanted to do the same: resist the pop music virus.

In the “and start west” section of Naked Lunch, Burroughs writes, “I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.”

Interviewed by Michael Bloom sometime in the 1970s, Reed says of MMM, “You listen to it in little doses. It’s always different. It’s not like you can whistle it.” In other words, it’s antiviral.
Reed never claimed to have made MMM to change reality, although in the album liner notes he writes “This record is not for parties/dancing/background romance” suggesting that it has a purpose. That purpose was to combat the rock and roll virus, including his own music, which had become a means of control masquerading as rebellion pushed by record companies. MMM fought back by smuggling “‘real’ rock about ‘real’ things” into the bedrooms of his teenage fans.

Rock And Roll Rituals

For those of us who were adolescents and teenagers in 1975, consuming an album was a ritual act of worship. We didn’t just listen. We opened the gatefold cover, gazed at the glamorous images of the stars we venerated and lost ourselves in fantasy.

My 13-year-old Lou Reed fanboy self is at the record store salivating over the cover of MMM and handing over my hard-earned pocket money. Hurrying home, I close the door to my bedroom. The familiar ritual begins. I gaze at the image of Reed in full Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal drag, slip on my headphones, put the record on the turntable and drop the needle, settle down to read the bewildering liner notes and wait for the album to start, for the familiar sound of Reed’s drawl and simple, three-chord rock and roll. I am sorely disappointed.

Daniel C. Jacobson, in his CUNY dissertation “You Can’t Be Shakespeare and You Can’t Be Joyce: Lou Reed, Modernism, and Mass Production” explores the notion of music as an instrument of desire and control. He argues that MMM denies the listener the possibility to escape into the familiar rock and roll time of albums such as Sally Can’t Dance. He quotes Junky:

A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

He also equates the drug junk with one-dimensional cultural junk like, arguably, the heavy metal Reed described in the liner notes of MMM as “diffuse, obtuse, weak, boring and ultimately an embarrassment”.

Jacobson goes on to suggest that “meditation on time, on the wait, on the anatomy of desire itself,” as expressed in “I’m Waiting For The Man” fascinated Reed as it did Burroughs. His conclusion is that MMM is “a culmination of these trains of thought.” The strategies Reed employed to frustrate the fans he was so desperate to lose at the time can certainly be seen as playing with the wait and the anatomy of desire.

To return to my 13-year-old self, after four sides of Metal Machine Music I finally realize that the sound I expected is never going to arrive. Pissed off, I schlep back to the record store and complain that the record is faulty. Record store guy tells me with a mocking grin that this is how it’s meant to sound. Didn’t I know that? But if I want I can swap it for Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy or Wings’ Venus and Mars. With a sinking heart, I accept that if I want to keep the record I’ve invested in, I will be forced to listen to it as what it presents itself as being.

I will have to, as Jacobson says, accept the album as noise “without a clear meaning, resolution, or goal.” But MMM does have a goal or purpose. Just as Burroughs’ cut-ups always have a purpose. As I have said, MMM‘s is to resist the rock and roll virus. It is “an act of sound,” as the promotional blurb for the 180 GSM vinyl reissue (possibly written by Reed) insists, a rock and roll ritual of magical resistance.

So much for the theoretical similarities between Burroughs’ mission and Reed’s. What about the actual practice of making the tapes? Reed gave the most detailed account of what he did to the basic tapes of guitars feeding back in an undated interview published in Browbeat magazine (1996).

First a word of warning. Reed was notorious for his combative relationship with the music press and often lying to journalists. Talking to journalist Anthony DeCurtis in 2006, he said: “They’re just interviews. Doesn’t mean anything. There are shadings. Just fucking around with somebody that’s not worth reading. Who gives a shit?”

Looking back at a turbulent career he described as growing up in public, Reed could be forgiven for insisting he didn’t tell the truth in interviews. It’s also plausible that he could be attempting to give MMM artistic validity in the Browbeat interview at a time when it was reviled.

For example, Reed makes the extremely hard to believe claim that eight or nine years before MMM was released, Atlantic Records, parent of the VU’s label Cotillion, “wanted to put it out, the basic track of it. And they were gonna give me a name like John Holczek, or something, and say it was an electronic record made by a Czechoslovakian composer.” This claim, never made anywhere else, could be an in-joke or Reed investing the album with credibility it didn’t deserve.^**

Reed might also be frustrating any attempt to pin down the real story of how MMM came about. When Burroughs was asked how Naked Lunch was written, he replied “Excuse me, there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event.”

Whatever Reed was playing at, it’s hard to imagine him going to the trouble of inventing an entire methodology. And in the absence of other detailed accounts of the making of MMM, the Browbeat interview is the best we have.

Tape recorders were essential tools for Reed in constructing Metal Machine Music. To Browbeat, he described how he used his reel-to-reel Uher two-track and Sony ½ track. His explanation is perhaps deliberately hard to follow. The essence is he bounced what he’d recorded backwards and forwards between two tape recorders while recording guitars over the top and “playing around with the reverb, the tone controls, things like that…the equalization bias. For instance, the speed of the tape.” He edited the tape by hitting the pause control, creating an audio cut-up.

Reed told Browbeat “the way I set it up, it would have to fold in on itself.” Deliberately or otherwise, his explanation recalls Burroughs and Gysin’s fold-in method. Burroughs and Gysin claimed that the effect of fold-in was like music:

When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one — the déjà vu phenomenon can so be produced to order — This method is of course used in music, where we are continually moved backward and forward on the time track by repetition and rearrangements of musical themes.

Apart from cutting up his raw material, Reed layered recordings played forwards and backwards on top of each other in a process that echoes how a fold-in is made.

Reed’s description of his working method is in marked contrast to the MMM creation myth as described by his keyboard player Michael Fonfara who was part of his circle at the time. Conjuring up the demonically possessed little girl Regan in The Exorcist, Fonfara said:

I helped him carry the amplifiers up to that room and made sure that they were all turned up to eleven [sic] and were feeding back — it was a pile of amplifiers all in one room that were strung up together, and one guitar to activate them with feedback. It was howling like the Devil. We had to leave the room and let the recording do the rest.

In this account, it sounds simply like Reed is recording some kind of elemental force without interfering: feedback as white light. There is no sense that MMM is a highly constructed piece of work, as the Browbeat interview suggests.

But as anyone who’s ever experimented with the cut-up method will know, while it’s true that it’s not difficult to cut up text or sound and play with it, arriving at something usable is a different thing entirely. Burroughs worked painstakingly on his cut-ups and fold-ins until he got the effect he wanted. Reed spent months if not years running his tapes backwards and forwards and recording new guitar parts over the top.

When Reed brought the tape of Metal Machine Music to Bob Ludwig at Sterling Sound to be mastered, it was a finished piece of work. Reed and Ludwig mastered the original four-track tape for quad. “Lou came in the door and we got to work,” Ludwig says, “It was very professional and straightforward.”

As to the question of whether Reed was applying Burroughs’ cut-up or fold-in methods to what he recorded, we’ll never know for sure, but the similarities offer a useful way to interpret MMM.

Metal Machine Baraka

When I first heard MMM, the opening few seconds reminded me of something. Later I made the connection between the high-pitched whine that appears out of the low rumble of guitars and music played by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, a tiny village in the Ahl-Srif mountains roughly 90 miles north of Tangier. I have heard this music in the village several times.

The music is played on rhaitas, an Arabic wind instrument that makes a piercing noise, over thunderous ibil double-sided drum rhythms. It accompanies the reenactment of the arrival of half man half goat Pan-like Bou Jeloud in the village centuries ago. According to legend, the villagers tricked Bou Jeloud into giving them the gift of music. The Masters also believe their music has the power to heal madness and infertility through a baraka or spirit given to them by wandering Sufi saint Sidi Hmed Shikh whose tomb is, as musicologist Philip Schuyler wrote, “the spiritual and geographic center” of the village.

When the musicians are using their music to heal they point their instrument at the “patient.”
The music the Masters play to heal is called the “Kaimanos.” Rikki Stein, who lived with Master Musicians in Joujouka and later managed them wrote:

The healing took the form of a precise piece of music; a wondrous symphony called the Kaimonos, that would soar forth to enter the being of everyone present, and like some powerful invisible hand, would seek out, with a surgeon’s delicate touch, the source of pain.

Talking to me, Stein says of the first time he heard the Kaimanos, “It’s like something is being sucked out of you. It’s a terribly painful experience. The second time, it’s a little easier but still very powerful. Third time, it’s cool.” Very much like encountering Metal Machine Music.

I can’t say whether the Master Musicans’ baraka really does heal the mentally ill and infertile. A Western medical doctor who studied faith healing in Morocco once said to me that the conclusion he reached was that if the person doing the healing and the person wanting to be healed believe it can happen, it can. The Masters believe they can heal, as do their Moroccan patients.

Eyewitnesses have told me they have seen seriously disturbed people chained to the deeply scarred tree near Sidi Hmed Shikh’s tomb become calm after being blasted by the Kaimanos but they could simply be worn out.

Listening to the music that accompanies Bou Jeloud’s arrival — different from the Kaimanos, I believe — has disoriented me, made me lose track of time, disrupted my thoughts and sent me into a trance. Musicologist Andy McGuinness says trance can be achieved through effects like the use of rhythms that “seem to involve hemiola — subdivisions of the beat grouped differently at different times — that speed up over the course of a few minutes and spatial disorientation caused by ‘false cues’ to the brain mechanism that determines the direction of sound.”

WSB first heard the music of Joujouka in 1957 at Gysin’s Tangier 1001 Nights restaurant. His first documented visit to Joujouka was in 1963. Burroughs’ admittedly unscholarly description of “Arab music,” that “It just runs along for a while, and then stops” can be applied to Metal Machine Music.

Joujouka music became significant for WSB’s writing, particularly cut-up novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962, 1967). Brion Gysin also introduced Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to the music of Joujouka. Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971) uses field recordings made in the village when he visited in 1968.

As an admirer of Burroughs, Reed may have read Ticket. It’s more likely that he would have at least given Brian Jones Presents a cursory listen. He admired Jones, writing in his essay “Fallen Nights and Fallen Ladies” that the Rolling Stone was “always ahead of style, perfect Brian.”

The Ticket That Exploded is WSB’s response to pop music’s ubiquity in the early 1960s. Pop music is the perfect narcotic. Love, in Reed’s beloved doo-wop for instance, is almost invariably allied to yearning or desire unfulfilled. Desire sells recorded music — referred to as “product” by the music industry — and drives capitalist mass culture. But like the “genuine whale-dreck” of Naked Lunch, “a horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles” no one has found any use for, MMM is an anti-product designed not to be desired or consumed. Although, thanks to the legend of MMM and the scarcity of original vinyl copies of the album, it has become a highly desirable artifact.

Evoked by the phrase “the blue notes of Pan” repeated in permutations throughout Ticket, the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka is a weapon with which to fight the pop industrial complex:

Towers and owners went up in a riotous blast of burning film — A great rent tore the whole structure of the garden to the blue sky beyond — He put the flute to his lips and blue notes of Pan trickled down from the remote mountain village of his childhood — The prisoners heard the pipes and streamed out of the garden.

Repeated variations on “blue notes of Pan” apply the fold-in method as described in The Third Mind to mimic the effect of music: drawing the reader and listener backwards and forwards in time. Throughout Metal Machine Music, Reed repeats certain motifs such as a noise that sounds like seagulls crying to bring us back to the album’s own time.

Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka was posthumously released on Rolling Stones records in 1971 backed by a music press ad campaign. Even if Reed didn’t listen to the album and never heard the piercing sound of the rhaitas on opening cut “55 (Hamsa oua Hamsine),” he could have seen the intriguing ads with their headline “The 4,000 year old Rock and Roll band.” He might have read Robert Palmer’s wonderfully evocative 1971 article in Rolling Stone about his own visit to Joujouka where he witnessed the Bou Jeloud ritual and heard the Kaimanos build “kinetic phrases to a pitch of hysteria.”

Had he read Palmer’s article, Reed would no doubt have appreciated the Burroughs connection along with the magical, healing purpose of the music recorded by Brian Jones using his two Uher tape recorders then cut up and treated to recreate the experience of listening to the healing music at Joujouka and transmit its power.

Reed could well have read Burroughs’ January 1973 article for Oui magazine describing his return to Joujouka to cover Reed’s hero Ornette Coleman playing with the Master Musicians. Burroughs emphasizes the physical effect of the music the jazz musician made with the Moroccans, writing that “the music that emerged was a palpable force felt by everyone present.” As is Metal Machine Music.

Part of the Ornette Coleman/Master Musicians of Joujouka encounter was released as “Midnight Sun” on the 1977 Dancing in Your Head album which Reed had and played often.

The Unlikely Healer: Metal Machine Meditation

Recognizing the similarity between the music of Joujouka and MMM led me to consider the latter’s effect on mind and body. I played the album as loud as I could bear on the state-of-the-art system at a recording studio and softly through headphones while lying on my back in darkness with my eyes closed. I canvassed Lou Reed fans via a Facebook fan page asking how they experienced listening to the album. Aware that our responses might be biased by our adoration of Reed, I played the album to my wife on headphones. She’s not a Lou Reed fan. She was present when I listened to MMM in the recording studio.

Played loud, once I get past my first reaction to run away from the noise I lose my ability to connect my thoughts. When I listen quietly on headphones, I become deeply relaxed and enjoy auditory and visual hallucinations. Loud or soft, after I’ve played Metal Machine Music, I always experience an almost feverish onslaught of inspiration a few hours later.

Among the Lou Reed fans who responded to my question was one who, explaining that they were bipolar, said that listening to the album as loud as they could stand calmed them down.
Listening to the album played through the recording studio sound system, my wife described it as “so powerful it knocks your brain out.” Played to her quietly on headphones, MMM caused audio and visual hallucinations. She experienced the same surge of inspiration a few hours later as I did.

After these admittedly less than rigorous experiments, my conclusion is that Metal Machine Music works in the same way as do the music made by the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine flicker device and the cut-up.

Cut-ups are initially bewildering. But unless I’m obliged to study them closely, I enter into a kind of trance.

Brion Gysin called the Dreamachine “the end of art.” He saw it as a means to make “people more awake, not send them to sleep.” Burroughs suggested that the Dreamachine could help dismantle “the great elaborate” mass media machine whose tentacles had rock and roll in their grasp.

Metal Machine Music affects electrical activity in the brain, possibly in a way that approximates to the 8 to 13 hertz oscillations of alpha brainwaves, which can produce visions and distort the perception of time. It helps listeners to relax and entrain the breathing to achieve the calm necessary to allow creative, visionary thinking to blossom.

In the end, whether Lou Reed was consciously influenced by William S. Burroughs or not is secondary to the effect of listening to Metal Machine Music. It is a singular piece of music with the power to change consciousness and perhaps make listeners wake up and see what’s really on the end of their fork.

Christmas 2025 and my 63-year-old self takes delivery of an original vinyl copy of Metal Machine Music, in truth the first I’ve ever owned. I wrestle the album out of the origami cardboard packaging then its cracked protective plastic sheath. The first thing that hits me is how the thing smells, as if it’s been locked in a cellar since 1975. I place disc one on my turntable, lower the tonearm and that familiar rumble and whine fills the room. Past, present, future fold in. I’m moved on that time track. This thing I worship is alive.

Endnotes

^* I don’t have the patience to listen to each side of the vinyl album with a stopwatch, but Spotify gives track times. The times for Metal Machine Music are side one 16.05, side two 15.54, side three 16.09, side four 15.50 but each track stops three seconds before the time Spotify gives. So far so pedantic but it’s interesting to speculate why the times are not what the label says they are. These are the reasons I can think of:

1. Reed wanted the process to appear more industrial and less artistic than it really was
2. He wanted to include a sound he liked as part of a particular side so he broke his own rules
3. It wasn’t technically possible to be as accurate with timings as the disc labels claim.

^** It’s a bit of a stretch but Reed could be referring to the “Electric Rock Symphony” he recorded in 1966, regarded as a demo for Metal Machine Music by the Lou Reed Archive.

Reference

Browbeat magazine, 1996
Metal Machine Music (1975), vinyl, CD and Blu-ray
Will Hermes, Lou Reed: The King of New York (2023)
Daniel C. Jacobson, “You Can’t Be Shakespeare and You Can’t Be Joyce: Lou Reed, Modernism, and Mass Production” (CUNY dissertation)
Lou Reed with Anthony DeCurtis (2006)
Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll (2020)
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (1978)
Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988)
Rikki Stein, Moving Music: The Memoirs of Rikki Stein (2024)
Christopher Land, “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control”
Oliver Harris, “Danger Sign”
“William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review #36
David Holzer, “Chasing the White Light: Lou Reed, the Telepathic Secretary and Metal Machine Music,” “Arabic Music and Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded,” “Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka:a talismanic album approaches 50,” “Revolution by flicker: 60 years of the Dreamachine,”
Photo of Lou Reed signing MMM © Mila Reynaud.
Other Lou Reed photos from the collection of Gordon Lyon.
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album cover from author’s collection

Thanks to Oliver Harris, Casey Rae, Victor Bockris, Bob Ludwig, and Michael Ramirez.